FOREWORD

My book is finally born. This is my heart and my hands. I'm in my own room with my chili plant and my writing desk. This book contains important texts that I've performed since age 18, in all sorts of imaginable places - cellars, riverboats, theater stages, revivals, virtual realities. In living rooms, at afterparties, in bed, at festivals, in clubs and city squares, in dance halls, out in the world.

I always made scrapbooks when I was little. (Direction of will!) When I do something myself, I feel free. We don't need to ask for permission. We can create worlds of our own, a personal springtime we can each inhabit. That is power, energy, that is love. It's fun, and it has saved me.

<3: Elsa

Ruisrock 2017

A rowdy concert, hair tangled in dreadlock

I'm part of the mass and I enjoy the sweaty lumps, grimy people.

The one being watched has black-waxy eyes

she's skinny, but nevertheless so ugly-sexy

that the whole cold sky gleams in her eyeballs

and it's narrow under her skirt when she bows down low.

I'd like to know what's going on in that head of hers, although I know

she's actually depressed, I've heard, gravely mentally ill even though she's

so shamelessly present and dances like a countryside creature

and I'm jealous in a good way because it gives me energy to know

that I'll grow into the same kind of hurricane one day,

a steam engine, unforeseen, that weeps but the laughter would echo anyway.

(When the gig is over, the field is dusty and there's blood on the asphalt

so I go alone to play a clammy fake piano

filled with ice water, subzero slush

with brown whiskey cans floating around in it)

It occurs to me: I'm still always the poet that gabs to the backroom magicians

that it's freaky how these days big festivals book weirdos like us

to eat from Drake's candy stash and drink straight Jallu,

when some gray-faced geezer was just here asking

where the fuck is all the Jallu meant for Ultra Bra right when it's needed most.

And my stomach really hurts, probably a miscarriage

probably the fear

probably the jitters or probably the same

bowel cancer my mother had when she was young, but I still sit quietly alone and it's July,

and I'm amazingly inspired because other people are often just so goddamn great,

and I'm so relieved when my own performance is finally, successfully, over.

Blood & elm

What're you doing here? In the clinic corridor,

sitting to a Finnish Sunday beer.

Come here,

behind the muteness, into being.

The place you left behind when you found success.

You broke through and went your way.

Don't seek the truth, have a wallow and get perplexed.

Because you have to be, despite everything,

with the force of every cell

a flaw, observing the world with its only gift.

No one can stop the lands of darkness,

nor flee from the blazing flood of the sun.

No dragging your feet in the face of resistance.

We have to be free!

even to evaporate, to fall into depression again.

To drift in dark ocean eons,

to be washed ashore at last.

True understanding will come along eventually,

when in dying someone finally gets it,

they've been upset by happiness all their lives.

It's the happiness of a scar, an eternal fatigue

in torn nails and darknesses.

In closets out of reach.

Blood on my fingers and

there are buds on the elm in the yard.

My creative power is a balance between

indiscriminate joy and the greatest depths of sadness.

Go on, write one

Go on, write one, just one hardcover.

Have the patience to sit down and write.

Create after doing sports,

write when you still know what to do.

Write before the wrinkling mist

write while drunk as hell.

The readers are waiting, go on write one,

they want characters on their touch screens

and for someone to care, they want you to want to fuck,

their jaws are open and they're expecting a story.

Do some proper writing, a proper collection,

that drink was pretty expensive you know, do you hear me,

from beginning to end now that you've started.

From this brutal life brutal

give everything you've got, your very skin!

Write - you know you want to

down from your heartstrings to a blubbering yowl,

your grand waltz shall be wuthering heights,

write how you were sick and got better oh yeah

write about your miniskirts, write about your period,

straight A's in crushing silence.

About that excruciatingly raw sexual affair,

the money that grows between your eyes.

Write so the headlines will scream in the morning

write, and don't be a basic campsite slut,

just one sobbing, rough-cheeked poem.

just anything radical,

just a couple really tight,

fiery pages.

Pelvis

when I was sleeping

a pelvis lay next to me.

this bone-hard warm

pelvis was mine

and a vital part of my hot body.

but the pelvis got up and left for the shadows without me

slept with others and danced on foreign decks

changed its form, tried out everything

traced a rope of words with its motions

by my pelvis, on the mattress of my face

people wrote and wrote and wrote

I stayed asleep, mute alone

my mouth was closed, but my insides knew:

I must recover what belongs to me.

List / Delicious meaningful ideas to write about (from when I was younger)

* the teens one table over who are watching us more than each other

* forgetting and neglecting a mouth piercing

* a friend's insistent attempts to convince me to hit the clubs when I'm already in bed,
 and that I consider the offer seriously

* combinations of crying-tantrum-crying-laughing

* message "kamppi parking bld 10min"

* bodily fluids, agency

* infatuated people and their flirty DMs

* illusions of I can/I can't

* being moved to tears with you, caused by the song of a drainpipe

* listening to radio nostalgia in a hot dimly lit sauna and the dark cold-foggy shower

* strippers at UFF shopping drunk on a Friday

* the need to be pampered and cuddled

* semi-skimmed milk on skin and the smell of a movie

* "I'm so looking forward to someone finding you and falling for you. I'm going to really relate to that person. And be like, I knew it. It would be lovely to be crazy about you." Hmm

* dangling electronic devices by their charger cords and related stuff

* the feeling of taking a risk, sailing drunk and old wrecked cars

* the knowledge that one of my habits is smacking my lips in my sleep, but my eternal ignorance of what it sounds like

* the hand-made italian chocolate goo I just had (?)

* fragrant and bright domestic toners and the way they feel on my cheek

* Mimosa the plant, which reacts to touch and curls up in response

* compact, elegant, and firm evening wear that makes me feel sexy

* capering on the shore of a marsh

* driving 200km/h on the motorway with friends, and suddenly my other friends' car driving up next to ours, explosive window-opening glee-howls of hey


* waiting outside Tavastia in the rain, and waiting for a party sad and demanding

* licking a rolled lemon cigarette and the white gaze of male types, both in the old railway station tunnel

* fav kaossilator loop, sort of underwater sound

* terror of electric and too-sharp drum'n'bass

* accidental combined use of prescription morphine-derivative (codeine) and vodka on new year's eve, the following euphoria and perfectly paranoia-free comedown, and laughing at it afterward

* things I'd like to be called in addition to lintunen/little bird: smoothie, kitten, blueberry pie and honey and ruusunen/rose

9. a person who touches someone else but looks at you while doing it

10. reading classic fairy tales out loud to someone who is sleepy, on a well-made bed


11. wooden steps whose surface has gone green and gluey

12. uncanny valley

13. gratitude for having my own name


* poetry evenings where you can listen in peace and write notes

* excess (too little moderation in life)

* pressing a scented tealight candle into the candlestick spike so the foil is punctured

* the dent in a light cider can, and the quiet and barely noticeable emptying of its contents and the stickiness on my writing pad

* a fridge-cold, salt-oozing hunk of halloumi fried the night before always tastes a bit like blood to me → I know why

* pounding the keys of an old typewriter and the rhythmic pounding of my heart

* I need to know all the quiet microscopic cells that pump life into you, to caress them and learn how they keep you alive so you're able to smile and say annoying stuff

* reading minds * necessary law reforms


* the feeling, about twice a year, that cannot be verbalized, sort of like a material and texture you can feel with your eyes closed, behind the eyes and in the mouth, a strange waxy thick-thin nugget

* the beautiful glassy spectrum of light on the walls cast by the chandelier in the house of a killer in a crime series, and discovering the same phenomenon at a friend's house

* dialogues that end in aggressive knotted stalemates and sniping

* where is the limit for tolerating taboos and your own thoughts? and why do humans feel guilty about normal things and thoughts that are unusual but that you still want to and crave to think

* personal withering and internalized misogyny

* the dreamy and romantic nights of life, two more of which appear every year


15. being alone on stage

16. the winner isn't the one who never loses, but who never quits

17. dozing together with friends, love

18. the slow tap of bare feet on the stone floor of a large room